7 Actionable Web Design Tips

With the growing popularity of content management systems (CMS) as marketing tools, web design skills are becoming a must have across the marketing industry. Now that you don’t need coding skills to edit the company website, employees from all different backgrounds have the ability to contribute to the company website. While this is great from a content perspective, it can leave designers cringing. Nothing is worse than delivering a perfect web design to a client just to see it go a little further downhill with each and every edit by a well-meaning layperson.

While the ability to have anyone edit a website is an added convenience for companies, most of these website editors don’t have an understanding of best practices in web design. The good news is, you don’t need a degree in web design to keep the company website up to a designer worthy standard. Keeping these seven tips in mind will not only save your designer a headache, but they will contribute to your thinking on any future design related project that crosses your desk.

1. Keep it Simple

Less is more, but less is often much harder to achieve than more. The biggest mistake I see non-designers make is to add elements (bold! underline! symbols and pictures!) to emphasize a point. Simplicity is the key to effectively getting your point across and making it easy for your website visitors to understand your message.

Visual Hierarchy

This key term is something I find myself repeating all too often in our office. Make sure that all elements on a webpage are relative in size to their importance. Every element on the page cannot carry the same importance so, it shouldn’t carry the same visual weight. More important elements can be easily distinguished with placement, size and colour.

Contrast

Pick up where your designer left off. Your website’s color scheme has been taken into very careful consideration, so utilize it. Choose colors in your scheme that are on opposite ends of the spectrum, it will help viewers distinguish elements and take the appropriate action. Do NOT choose colors that are not in the website scheme simply because you think it will catch someone’s attention – too often, you WILL catch someone’s attention, but not for the right reasons.